1. Technical Field
Embodiments of the invention relate generally to patient monitoring and, more specifically, to a system and method for providing auditory messages for physiological monitoring devices.
2. Discussion of Art
In medical environments, especially complex medical environments where multiple patients may be monitored for multiple medical conditions, standardization of alarms and/or warnings creates significant potential for confusion and inefficiency on the part of users (e.g., clinicians or patients) in responding to specific messages. For example, it is sometimes difficult for clinicians and/or users of medical devices to distinguish or quickly identify the source and condition of a particular audible alarm or warning. Accordingly, the effectiveness and efficiency with which users respond to medical messaging can be adversely affected, which, in turn, can lead to delays to responding to medical or system conditions associated with these audible alarms or warnings.
In particular, medical facilities typically include rooms that enable surgery to be performed on a patient, monitoring of a patient's medical condition, and/or patient diagnosis. At least some of these rooms include multiple medical devices that enable the clinician to perform different types of operations, monitoring, and/or diagnosis. During operation of these medical devices, at least some of the devices are configured to emit audible indications, such as audible alarms and/or warnings that are utilized to inform the clinician of a medical condition being monitored. For example, a heart monitor and a ventilator may be attached to a patient. When a medical condition arises, such as low heart rate or low respiration rate, the heart monitor or ventilator emits an audible indication that alerts and prompts the clinician to perform some action.
Under certain conditions or in certain medical environments, multiple medical devices may concurrently generate audible indications. In some instances, two different medical devices may generate the same audible indication or an indistinguishably similar audible indication. For example, the heart monitor and the ventilator may both generate a similar high-frequency sound when an urgent condition is detected with the patient, which is output as the audible indication. Therefore, under certain conditions, the clinician may not be able to distinguish whether the alarm condition is being generated by the heart monitor or the ventilator. In this case, the clinician visually observes each medical device to determine which medical device is generating the audible indication. Moreover, when three, four, or more medical devices are being utilized, it is often difficult for the clinician to easily determine which medical device is currently generating the audible indication. Thus, delay in taking action could potentially result from the inability to distinguish the audible indications from the different devices. Additionally, in some instances the clinician may not be able to associate the audible indication with a specific condition and accordingly may need to visually view the medical device to assess a course of action.
As a result, in typical clinical settings, there is a lack of inherent meaning of medical messages in the auditory environment. Accordingly, the meanings need to be learned, which can result in the lack of a timely response, particularly with a novice clinical user, potentially causing adverse consequences to patients. There is also a lack of a meaningful relationship between the physical properties of auditory device signals and the intended messages, which can result in a lack of perceptual discrimination among various auditory signals.